h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In a way Reloaded points out the foolishness of religon - By blindly following the 'prophecy' that Morpheous beleives in and was created by the machines to keep the miscreant 1% in line, they get played by the machines around the world, and end up at the mainframe by doing just what all the program's regulators (The Oracle, The Architect etc.) intend for them to do.
I wonder if Revolutions will feature the humans actually using some bloody initative.
I also think the Architect was well aware of which door Neo would choose, and so the machines will have prepared for it.
And yes, the science doesnt work - humans do indeed generate a considerable amount of electrical current, mostly in their brains, but they consume far more chemical energy.

That does make sense, Hoo. Thank you.

I haven't finished the backlog yet, but.. great film, have to se it again.
After the berklian philosophy in the first film, (our knowledge of the outside world is totally dependant on our senses, can we trust what they tell us)
Reloaded asks the question, is there such a thing as choice, or is it all cause and effect. Wonder whats coming next?

i can see how it could be difficult to follow if you missed the first one, but otherwise ...

Aerobic respiration is hugely more efficient at releasing chemical energy than combustion, and any energy used by the human will come out as heat, which the machines are using anyway.

I doubt it'd actually work, but it does make for a cool effect with the waves of lightning moving across the human fields and up the whatever it is (tesla coil? jacob's ladder?).

OK now have read the backlog and its obvious its a take off of bladerunner and total recal, where Neo is a program but doesn't know it,
and "the real world" is just another area of the matrix used by the machines to program neo into thinking the matrix is the construction of the machines and not the humans, in order to get him to bring it down, letting the machines win the war they were on the point of losing...
(the matrix being set up by humans having destroyed their own world, and exact control over their environmetal conditions, all that keeps them alive, whilst the matrix allows the minds to evolve)
yah da ya da yah da...

i like the bluring between man and machine

I don't buy the 'Humans as batteries' thing anyway. The human body consumes far too many resources to be efficient as an energy storage mechanism. A friend of mine thinks that the humans are *actually* used as part of the Matrix's computing grid - it's using their brains as part of its processing.

My theory about the end of 'Reloaded' is that Neo leaving through the other door was the equivalent of Ford Prefect leaving Zarniwoop's office through the window - he thinks he's back out of the Matrix, but he's actually still in there.

But what do I know - I got confused early on when they found the Keymaker. My reaction was 'Oh great - the fate of the world rests on Mr Byrite'.

Perhaps it is just folly to try and workout the science behind Matrix: Reloaded (and I'm a scientifically minded person), it is after all not a documentary but a film to enjoy.

Although, I do know I didn't enjoy it as much as the first Matrix film.

As far as the "Is there such thing as choice?" idea, Doctor Susan Greenfield, who did the BBC series about the brain, has done much research on the subject and if I'm correct, she said that all conciousness is an illusion of immediacy and that we have already made up our minds in our subconcious.

However, I could be wrong, better to ask Doctor Greenfield herself.

Your Ever Humble Servant,

KMA winner Neri Aracro

Hm, It would be pretty big news in psychology if someone had managed to prove cause and effect worked for people. There are those that belive it, I'm suprised to find the idea of determinisim (which I tend to associate with behaviourism) and the unconcious (which I tend to associate with a more psychodynamic approach)
Any chance of a link to this research, I'd be interested.

So far as using people as part of a processor - well it's being tried in RL (Though we have the decency to wait until they were already dead). I heard of people trying to get biocomputers to work, it all sounded very interesting - though I came across it before I started this degree. I wonder if anything came of it.

No this isn't right.

I have finished. This years exams are done. I do not need to research every interesting peice of information I come across.

I'm interested in the idea that humans are used for the processing power.

Cus, when you think about it, that's exactly what the Agent programs make use of. When an Agent program jumps into another body (in the Matrix) what they are doing, in effect, is writing their program into that person's brain (in the real world). And then manipulating that person's imprint onto the Matrix.

Question is, as the Agents move from body to body, what happens to the bodies that they leave volunterily? In order to enter a body they must leave one, so what happens to the one they left? In the films you only see them leave a body when that body dies, so there's no answers there.


Geggs

unles of course the agent program jsust occupies the virtual construct that the human brain is using as its interface. If so, are the occupied just knocked off line, and end up in zion as system anomolies?
In the first film, Cypher was told he could be plugged back into the matrix, so maybe they can be re-routed elsewhere.

No, that can't be it. Cus when Smith copies himself onto Bane in Reloaded, Bane still acts like he's Smith after he's been disconnected, so they must imprint themselves onto the person, not just the avatar of the person.


Geggs

The body probably regains its own control and senses as soon as the Agent departs, and the victim decides they had a blackout.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Gotta wonder what the people around them might say though.

"That was strange. Never had a blackout before."

"Mom, you didn't black out, you turned into an entirely different person."

"Oh no, don't tell me I'm having split personalities now!"

"No, physically different. You were a man, Mom!"

"Are you sure you're not seeing things?"

"No mom, it was some weird goverment-type."

"I think we both need therapy!"


Geggs

In any other movie series this wouldn't be worth mentioning, but since "Enter the Matrix" is written and directed by the brothers W., and is so intimately woven into the universe of the film that it must be considered canonical...

In the Playstation version of "Enter the Matrix" there is at least one point (in the airport, I think, where Ghost and Niobe have to rescue Soren) where an agent is seen to leave the body of a S.W.A.T. team guy who is still alive - and the guy just seems to shake his head as though to say and then just goes about his business.

This seems to imply that it's possible for an agent to temporarily "inhabit" a person and then leave them alive. Think, for example, of the climactic chase scene in "The Matrix", where Neo was just running, unarmed, from three agents, and they were jumping from body to body to pursue him, including the two little old ladies who were watching "The Prisoner". Now, since Neo had no way of killing them, they must have been leaving their previous hosts intact, if a little confused...

H.

I reckon people could get around it quite easily - I've had conversations like this in RL:
Me: "Hi hannah"
Hannah: "Hi"
"This is gonna sound odd, but did anything important happen to Farrah this Tuesday?"
"No"
"Sure?"
"Hmm, absolutely - why?"
"I had the wierdest dream, I dreamt that Matt had proposed and they were engaged"
"*laughs*, he did, they are - it was on Wednesday"
I figure if I can remeber that as a dream someone could equally figure that becoming an agent would be similar.

I didn't read the backlog, but an idea occurred to me: the reason the Matrix needs Zion is so that they will free the 1% the Architect mentioned, keeping the system stable. (Remember, widespread rejection was what caused the first Matrix to fail.) Once the population of Zion reaches some number, and the One appears, the machines destroy Zion, thus removing the threat of Trinity/Morpheus types wreaking general havoc within the system. After that, the One chooses a new starting population for Zion (since presumably humans know humans better than machines do). Since Neo is not going to choose a new population for Zion, there won't be another Zion and so the disbelieving 1% will remain in the Matrix, eventually causing it to collapse (hence the Architect's statement that "everyone will die"). My prediction is that the Architect's and other machines' inability to react well to the unexpected will be their downfall. (Didn't the Architect say that Neo wouldn't be able to save Trinity?)

Draw a distinction between what the machines say and what the machines know. The oracle made a very deceptive (Yet every word she said was completely correct) speech in the first film (Much more cleverly done than her speech in this film) and many of the programs have simply flat out lied.

On an unrelated note - there is a small cutscene in the 'Enter the Matrix' game with a crazy old tramp gloating at Niobe that it took 72 hours to destroy Zion 'last time'. Watch out for him in Matrix 3.

Anyone else dislike the fact that the Wachowski's have basically put the entire backstory to this film in various strands of the media? The Animatrix and the game aren't available to everybody, and it seems to me more like a marketing ploy than some bold step in media cross-breeding.

It's not the first time it's been tried, but it certainly seems to be the most thorough.

Didn't AI have a rather extensive chain of web sites tied in to the back story?

<>



az